Ryan/Sawyer Marketing in Grand Junction, CO

The Metrics Revelations

Imagine this scenario: you and a friend decide to go to a
movie. You walk into the theater where 5 movies are playing. You and your
friend know absolutely nothing about any of the movies that are at that theater.
How do you decide which one to see? Do you blindly pick one based on how catchy
the title is? Do you flip a coin? Do you spin around until you’re dizzy, close
your eyes, and walk up to a poster to determine which one you see?

That seems like a waste of a $15 movie ticket to me
(more, if you also spring for popcorn and a soda).

The point is this: you need more detail about each of
those movies to make an informed decision about which one deserves your money.

The same is true in marketing. It’s hard to know which
tactics to employ in a marketing campaign if you don’t have any reliable
metrics in which to guide your decision.

The sad truth is that most small-business marketers don’t
have the metrics they need, or aren’t sure what to do with the information they
have. The good news is that with the continual growth of digital marketing
platforms, getting a hold of these metrics is becoming easier.

Dan’s last blog discussed the value of reviewing metrics post-campaign, and distilled it down to the most basic, core ones that are relevant for most businesses. This is your starting point for evaluating the health of your marketing campaign.

Facebook

Installing the Facebook pixel in the header of your
website feeds valuable and insightful information back to Facebook about your
customers. With this information, you can drill down to weekly, monthly, and
daily users; look at active users by hour for each day of the week; build
funnels to see how visitors are traveling through a desired set of actions or
parse out greater detail about data; look at device overlap from phone vs
desktop vs tablet; and view visitor demographics.

Yes, some of this overlaps with data from other sources
like Google Analytics. But viewed together, you can build a clearer picture of
your audience – the most active times on your Facebook page, whether they view
your page from multiple devices or only a singular one, and what sort of
retention you have on your page and ads.

Device overlap as reported by Facebook Pixel. You can see that in this example, Desktop and Phone usage overlaps, but Tablet usage remains independent from other methods of accessing the website.

This information can help you build a strategy on your
next Facebook campaign, or even just regular posts, by targeting when your
audience sees that information, whether it’s mobile-optimized, and where
geographically to target your ad.

Google Analytics

Analytics is the old stand-by for website metrics. You’ll
get all the standard traffic, landing pages, top pages, and other engagement
metrics that Google has been providing for years. However, with the FB pixel
installed and by selecting Analytics to report on demographics and more
detailed visitor data, you’ll get a deeper dive into the site users.

Aside from measuring behavior paths through the site and
what pages stack up where, you’ll get substantially more psychographic
information about your users. Analytics now provides detail on Affinity
Audiences, In-Market Audiences, and what they lump into “Other” Audiences.

Affinity
Audiences analyze someone’s overall interests, passions, and lifestyle to
get a better sense of their overall identity. View Affinity Audiences as
individuals who have a general, long-standing
interest for a specific Affinity Segment.

An In-Market
Audience is composed of folks who are actively searching and comparing your
product/service. Individuals in this audience have indicated that they are
actively in-market for a specific category such as “Employment” or “Real
Estate” or “Travel” or any of the other audiences currently available from
Google. View In-Market Audiences as individuals who are temporarily interested in a specific In-Market segment.

Other
Category classification provides a more focused view of the type of content
users are interested in compared to the Affinity Categories. Note that a single
visit can be classified in multiple categories, and one visit could be also
counted multiple times in the visit metrics in these reports.

This level of detail into your audience helps build out
the profile of who you’re reaching and who you should be talking to. These
people are engaged in your brand. Make sure you’re meeting them where they are
– and use this information as a guide on where you should be.

Google Search
Console

Search Console, formerly Webmaster Tools, is the
complementary Google product to Analytics. In Console, you can (and should!)
submit sitemaps to trigger Google to index your site. Console, though, holds
the key to HOW people are finding you based on keywords. You’ll get a
comprehensive list of the keywords used in which your website appeared in the
search results. The data will let you know the keyword, the number of
impressions, the number of click-throughs, and the average position in which
you appeared.

You’ll find that the keywords fall into two categories:
branded and non-branded. Branded keywords are terms people used with your name
to get to your site. In our experience, these keywords aren’t the most helpful
as people already know you and are looking for you specifically. The
non-branded keywords of people looking for “widgets near me” are the most
helpful ones. The terms used here should be reflected in your website and any
social media as that’s how people are talking about it. They’re looking for
“water”, not “dihydrogen monoxide”.

Google Business

By now, your Google Business page should be claimed and
set up with all of your business’s relevant details: hours, location, logo,
services, description, website, etc. Once that’s set up, Google will offer
insights on how many times you’ve showed up in web searches, map searches, how
many people clicked-to-call your phone number, and the busiest days and times
you were displayed in results. These results alone are merely directional, but
taken in context with the other metrics, provide a clear, visual representation
of basic data based on search results.

Media-Specific
Metrics

Anytime you engage digital media to distribute ads, there
are metrics associated with that. Whether it’s Google Adwords (Pay Per Click),
Pandora or Spotify radio, or other digital platforms, the results should
provide a clear indication of what keywords are working, what isn’t, and the
level of engagement.

The Result

Yes, there are several places you have to go to find the
metrics you need to make informed business decisions (oh, by the way, they’re
all FREE), but the end-result is that those learnings drive future efforts and
improve the efficacy and efficiency of marketing efforts down the road. The
clearer the picture of who your target audience is, where they are, how they
get there, and what they do to engage with your brand, the stronger your
marketing will be.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the picture
you’re painting of your audience is never done; rather, your audience is
constantly evolving, just as your brand should be evolving, too. These metrics
and all the associated data are guides. They aren’t gospel. They can change, or
be flawed, or sometimes be contradictory, but they should always provide a
gauge of performance and insights into how to improve your efforts going
forward. They are directional feedback, not always and not necessarily literal
feedback.

The more you know about your audience, or keywords, or
device or anything else that’s important to you, the smarter you can be about
spending your budget.

That’s the data you should review in combination with
other data you find interesting or helpful and build your tactical marketing
plan from that. Much like with movies, you have a preference of action vs
comedy, one actor vs another, etc. Those matter to you for the $15 you’ll spend
on the movie. You need to determine what those important preferences are for
your brand and find out as much as you can in those categories before you spend
far north of $15 in your marketing.